Karmic Justice

They fired Il Duce.

... (pause to allow the realization/recognition to settle in) ...

Yes! They did. On Friday. I know. Shocking, isn't it? And especially shocking since he worked in the U.K. where employment laws protect you from up on high. You've practically got to be sleeping with an employee to get fired out there. (Oh, wait a minute...) Granted, I'm sure he still got a healthy severance package, but I've seen this company waste money on worse things. This, to me, seems like a good investment.

The funny thing (funny interesting, not funny ha-ha) is that this is a week shy of the year anniversary since I suggested my little coup d'état to my three managers last summer (Judy, Judas and Bob's Your Uncle), back when I'd had it up to here (hand raised to eyebrow level) with Il Duce's sex, lies and bad management in general. Who'd have thought, then, that things would work out like this 51 weeks later?

So, it's not work "shit" at all, this post. Work "fucking awesomeness" instead. Work "karmic retribution." Work "poetic justice." Yes, this is the first piece of good news that I've had to share about my job in a while. I just found out today, so pardon me while I get up and dance a little jig around the room.

(Jig dancing ensues.)

Recognition Deferred

I have been over-due for a promotion for a year and a half (at least).

Il Duce was a Director. Tiberius' other direct reports are Directors. My title is Associate Director (one level down). Which is, if you've read my previous rants, the position I've been at for a while:

• despite steady increases in my job responsibility,
  
• despite the fact that other Associate Directors in the company have a fraction of my responsibility,
  
• despite the fact that other Directors in the company have less responsibility,
  
• despite the fact that if he had to hire externally to replace me, there's no way Tiberius could bring anyone in at my level to do this job.

During my appraisal review, at the end of February, Tiberius said he couldn't promote me now, but that he would try in three to six months. He said that his boss, our Vice President, wouldn't approve it. But he wouldn't say why.

I said, "That's disappointing."

He countered with, "I'm not saying it's not going to happen. I'm just saying that it's not going to happen now."

"I don't care about the future," I told him. "I don't trust this company. Nothing personal, but I've been here far too long and have too many times heard about promotions that will happen at some nebulous time in the future. It doesn't matter to me. You're either promoting me now or you're not. And you're not. There really isn't anything more to say."

He said, "I know you're disappointed..." But I cut him off.

"I know you know that I'm disappointed, but I don't think you fully understand how disappointed I am. My disappointment cup is full to the rim and threatening to spill over."

Tiberius got visibly agitated. His position went from a promotion in "three-to-six months," to "by June," to "maybe we can do this now" in the span of a few minutes.

Didn't matter to me. I don't bluff when it comes to my job. I will do my best at all times, but when I decide to leave, I'll just do so without making threats or giving ultimatums. I knew I wasn't going to start looking until the end of March at least (when the bonuses come out), but after that, if Tiberius still hadn't promoted me, I would have to decide what I was going to do.

Funny thing happened, though. Through a little management restructuring, they moved a different guy above Tiberius. Sort of created a position between Tiberius and the VP who was blocking my promotion. This new guy (we'll call him Don Corleone) and I go way back. He hired me 10 years ago. The few years that I worked for him were my favorite at this company. I have a lot of respect for him. Not that I'd ever go to him and ask for favors, but I was looking forward to working under him again (even if I was two levels below). There, in itself, was a reason to stay.

Don Corleone got moved into this role at about the same time that Tiberius was telling me that he couldn't promote me. During our meeting, when I told him how disappointed I was, he said that he'd go talk to his new boss (Don Corleone) and see what he thought about it. Within a few days, Tiberius came back to me with a completely different tune and said they were going to promote me after all. Finally.

He said that he wanted to go run it past the other IT Vice Presidents so there wouldn't be any complications – apparently the appointment of a Director, even one slipping into a vacant role, can be controversial around here – but he and Don Corleone didn't think it would be a problem. This would go into effect April 1 with the rest of the promotions.

This all happened at the beginning of March. Needless to say, that month was the happiest I'd seen in several years. Il Duce was out of my hair, and I was finally getting the recognition I deserved for years of hard work. I can't remember the last time I was that excited about my work. I got more done that month than was humanly possible. Days, nights, weekends... I threw myself into the job where I finally felt appreciated.

So what happened? Clearly this not the end of the story.

On Monday, March 17, we managers got letters from HR to distribute to our staff telling them what their new salaries are and if any promotions have been made, what they are. I got mine for my staff and distributed them. Judas got his promotion, finally, my peace offering to him. He is now an Associate Director and he still works directly for me. (Apparently, you can have direct reports who are the same level as you, contrary to what Il Duce told me so many moons ago. Makes no sense. But anyway...) Congratulations to him.

I noticed that Tiberius had not sent me my own letter. I was leaving for a trip to the U.K. on Friday, so I stopped by his office several times that week and asked if we were going to meet. He said yes, but kept brushing me off. In the end, we never did.

So I set up a conference call for him later in the following week while I was away in the U.K. office, reminding him that he had not given me my letter, that I did not know the status of my promotion, raise or bonus, and I told him that I was getting a little concerned.

When we met, finally, over the phone, he told me that he had good news and bad news.

"Okay," I said. "Give me whichever first."

The good news, he told me, was that they had decided not to fire me. No, that's not exactly what he said, but it felt that way. What he told me was that they had discussed the option of posting my position externally and letting other candidates apply, which I could do as well, and we'd see who was the best person for the job. But they decided not to do that. So that was the good news.

"So the good news is that my job is not in jeopardy?" I asked him. "Something I didn't even know was a possibility until 2 minutes ago?"

He said yes. I told him it didn't feel like good news, but he insisted that it was.

The bad news, he said, adding, "and you're not going to like this," was that they couldn't promote me. Apparently, even though Don Corleone was now his boss, and the two of them agreed that I should be promoted, and it only requires two levels of approval to promote somebody, that the same VP who blocked the promotion before (now three levels above me) stepped in and quashed it again.

(Seriously. What does this guy have against me? I would love to sit down with him and ask, but Don Corleone says that's not a good idea.)

Sadly, Tiberius and Don Corleone knew about this early on in March, that I wasn't going to get prompted, and they didn't tell me. Instead they let me have the happiest month in recent history under completely false pretenses.

Tiberius still feels that he will be able to promote me eventually. "Not at some nebulous time in the future," he said, mimicking my own words just a month prior, "but soon." All I have to do, apparently, is convince some of the other IT Vice Presidents that I'm the right guy for the job. Tiberius said we were going to meet with them soon so I can present them with my strategy for my department.

That was six weeks ago and so far no such meetings have been scheduled. Yeah, I'm not optimistic.

So why do I still work here?

Good question. Sometimes I don't know, exactly. I like the job itself and the people who work for me, but I'm quite unhappy about how I'm treated from above.

Am I ready to go looking for a new job? Yes and No. Penelope and I have only lived here for two years. The likelihood of me finding a job at my level locally is slim, so I'd be looking at a nation-wide search. We've both agreed that we'll move if we have to, even though we'd also both prefer it if we stayed, so I'm only slowly dusting off my resume and getting ready to shop it around.

But at the same time, I know in my gut that Tiberius and Don Corleone will come through for me eventually, if I am willing to wait long enough. I've been in this position twice before at this company, once before with Don Corleone himself, and patience has always paid off. And even though it was frustrating to go through, after it was done and the injustice rectified, it felt worth it.

Can I count on this a third time? Am I a fool to trust that my luck will hold, or should I stick it out a little while longer? If so, how long should I wait before I start looking elsewhere?

Complicated questions with no good answers.

I'll follow-up when I have news.

Post-Script

Employee appraisals were due on January 17. Meaning, each manager submits his/her appraisals of their own employees to their second line manager at this time. Second line managers have until January 31 to review and approve, or reject and send back for more comments or even changes if they feel the scores aren't fair.

[Note: even though Il Duce had been moved to another part of the company and I no longer worked for him, he was still supposed to write the appraisals for his staff from the previous year (e.g., me), therefore, I wasn't completely rid of him, yet.]

I had spoken to Tiberius twice during the fall and said I was worried about my upcoming appraisal. I told him that Il Duce had trashed me on the previous one, at mid-year, and I wasn't going to take another one like that very well. Tiberius assured me (both times) that he wouldn't let that happen. He explained: "I have second-line approval over whatever [Il Duce] writes, and I will reject anything that isn't fair." I trusted him, perhaps blindly.

I wrote my own comments and submitted them to Il Duce, as per usual, early in January. I wrote volumes about all of the work I'd done over the year, knowing they would be largely, if not completely, ignored. I didn't comment on the troubles between the two of us. I felt those were personal issues that didn't have any place in my review.

Then I wrote all of my own employee appraisals and submitted them to Il Duce for his second-line review.

I trusted that Tiberius was keeping an eye on all of this, as he said he would.

A few days before the end of the month, Il Duce rejected a few of the reviews I'd written, namely those that I'd written for Bob's Your Uncle and Judas. He added his own comments into mine (yes, you can do that apparently) and said I was a bad manager for not realizing how valuable both of these two were, criticized me for not lavishing them both with high praise, and he wanted to me to remove any negative comments and raise both of their scores.

My "negative comments" were in fact constructive criticism in Judas' appraisal, mixed in with quite a lot of actual praise for the good work he did last year (magnanimous of me, I feel, in the face of Judas' betrayal). In Bob's Your Uncle's review, my comments were the best I could do to respond to the rambling that he (Bob) himself wrote about how bad a manager I was and how he (Bob) had suffered because Il Duce and I weren't getting along.

I was already giving Judas an above average score. Bob rated average because I felt that his technical work, which was good, balanced out his poor management skills. So to wit: neither was getting a negative (i.e., bad) score at all, yet Il Duce rejected them because they weren't good enough.

I showed Il Duce's rejections and comments to Tiberius, who suggested that I make a few minor changes that wouldn't affect the overall scores to appease Il Duce and call it good. So I did.

At about this time, I took a look in the appraisal system to see where my own review was. I wanted to know if Il Duce was still working on it or if he'd submitted it to Tiberius for a second-line review. What I found was that Il Duce had gotten it routed to someone else, the guy he was working for now (we'll call this guy Lord British), in a clear violation of policy. Somebody in charge wasn't paying attention when that happened, and Tiberius has been taken out of the equation altogether.

I found Tiberius and let him know what Il Duce had done. I reminded him again (for the third time, now) that I wasn't going to be happy with whatever Il Duce had presumably written, and I needed him to fix this. He promised to look into it, but I was duly nervous because he had promised to take care of this twice already.

Here's the complication. Lord British is our Chief Technology Officer, several levels about Tiberius. (How and why they decided that Il Duce would report to someone at this level is both beyond me and a gross misplacement of reason and logic.*) So Tiberius had to go to this guy with only a few days left in the review cycle and figure out a way to fix this.

And apparently he did. Within a day, my review had been moved in the system over to Tiberius who had an opportunity to make some changes. Apparently, though, the original manager's comments (Il Duce's) were locked. Tiberius could only add his own.

As best as I can tell, Il Duce tried to give me a 1.8 out 5. Tiberius upgraded that to a 2.8 out of 5. The lowest score I've ever gotten during my 10 years at this company. He said there was a limit to how much he could change, and that increasing my score above one full point would require HR interaction.

I said, "Sounds fine to me. Let's get HR in here. I've got plenty to say."

Tiberius said he didn't think that would be a good idea. He explained that he couldn't give me higher than a rounded-three anyway (all of our scores ultimately round to the nearest whole number when it comes to determining bonuses and raises) and I effectively got the same as a 3.49.

"Not really," I told him. "It still implies that I'm working below expectations. Is that what you're saying?"

He said, no.

"Then it's not the score I deserve."

But at that point, it was already finalized. Nothing to be done about it.

When Tiberius he showed me the written comments on my appraisal, he cautioned me that Il Duce's wouldn't make me very happy and said he would try to find a way to get them expunged after the review cycle was over. He asked that I just focus on his own comments.

I told him that I thought it would be a good idea of I didn't read Il Duce's comments at all. And to date, I haven't.


* May 2008 update: Apparently it was only a temporary assignment because he is now working for someone lower quite lower in the food chain.

Denouement

On December 19th, just a month ago, upper management sent out an email detailing a number of changes to our organization, among them was that Il Duce and the Business Intelligence Team were moving to another part of the company, effective January 1, singling me out the the head of my team now unencumbered by fools and tyrants.

I immediately got a couple of congratulatory calls from a few people:

Prodigal said it was about time.

I spoke with Judy a few days later, and she asked me if I was happy. I said, of course.

Judas eventually asked me if I was going to make any changes now that I'm back in charge. Reading between the lines, I know he was wondering if I was going to remove him from his management position considering everything that happened. I said there were no changes that would affect him, and I meant it.

Bob's Your Uncle never spoke about it.

I have a bit of work ahead of me. Several people in the team remain loyal to Il Duce. I need to find out what their intentions are and either get them to convert or encourage them to move on.

I have asked my new manager, Tiberius, to let me hire a new staff member to replace at least one of the three that I lost last year. He said that Il Duce told him that we didn't need anybody else in my team, that he should spend any available money on the Business Intelligence Team. After I explained how much we were hurting, he rather quickly agreed to let me hire someone new. Hopefully that will alleviate some of the pressure.

I have dealt with Bob's Your Uncle... for now. In the two weeks since his demotion he has been stirring up quiet trouble in the background while keeping a professional face on the surface. It remains to be seen what he really has in mind, but muck racking in the white noise department is about all he can do.

I am still doing twice the job that I was doing two and a half years ago, before Il Duce took over, for the same title and pay (minor annual increases aside). I've asked for a promotion, and I think I deserve one. A friend of mine suggested that if I were to leave, the company would have to bring someone in a the next level above me to do the job I'm doing now (at least) and I should point that out to them. I would hope I wouldn't have to.

I have my review coming up, written by Il Duce, of course. His opinion of me means about as much as the crust of dog turd stuck in the treads of my sneakers, but he has the ability to affect my raise. Plus a bad review might preclude any promotion that I am due. I have talked to Tiberius about this, who has agreed that I should be promoted (without promising anything), and has said he can intervene on my behalf and force Il Duce's hand during this review cycle. So now it's a waiting game to see if Tiberius will fight for me or not.

If so, I'm happy to stay. I have been tasked with making changes and fixing things, no small feat. Two and a half years ago, my North American team was strong, effective, efficient, and (best of all) happy. That's my goal for this larger group. It will take months, if not years, to get there.

However, if not, if they fuck me (is there a better way of putting it?), I don't see any reason compelling enough to stay.

Will there be more to the "Infinite Work Shit" saga? I hope not.

But I assume so.

Greek Tragedy in Three Acts

While Il Duce and I have only spoken a small handful of times since September, there has been a literal Greek tragedy going on behind the scenes between him and my three managers.

Act I: Judy

Judy, as it turns out, has been the most open and forthwith about this whole situation. She told me every time Il Duce approached her with requests for news from my team, with instructions meant to cut me out of the loop, with demands of his own. Considering she's out in London with him, in the same office, this is both surprising and appreciated.

Act II: Judas

Judas as been the most guarded about his blooming relationship with Il Duce but also the most obvious. He has taken it upon himself to implement strategies secretly suggested by Il Duce without consulting me. (Which I know to be true because he has implemented ideas, verbatim, that I have heard Il Duce suggest to me in the past so either Judas has remarkable foresight or he's been given explicit instructions to follow.) This has happened twice. Both times I let him try implementing these strategies himself for a little while with my guidance, but both times he ignored my guidance and didn't do what I was asking him to do, so I pulled the projects away from him and did them myself.

We met at the beginning of December (last month) because he was getting increasingly hostile towards me under the surface while still trying to keep a pleasant and friendly face on top (something he's not very good at). I asked him, outright, what was going on. He complained that I had taken these projects away from him. I explained that he wasn't following my instructions and I needed them to get done correctly. He said okay, fine, he could understand that, but it was the way in which I took them from him that he was really angry about, that I had humiliated him in front of his peers by taking them away. I said it was not my intention to humiliate him, but that as his manager it was at my discretion to move projects around.

Then he told me that he didn't appreciate the fact that I had called him back in August and asked him if it he was the one who had told Il Duce about my mutinous meeting. He said, "I didn't appreciate that witch hunt."

Witch hunt? Where had I heard those precise words before? Oh, right... verbatim from Il Duce himself.

I replied, "I was merely trying to figure out if something was bothering you that you might have wanted to discuss with me," which is precisely what I told him on the phone at the time.

I then explained my perception of Il Duce to Judas:

• his taking over the team under suspicious circumstances
• his empire building
• his relationship with Jezebel
• his attempts to promote Jezebel over Judas
• my attempts to stop that
• my attempts to promote Judas
• Il Duce's veto of that plan
• Il Duce's move of Jezebel to the other team where he could promote her
• and finally the fact that Il Duce and the entire other team was moving to a different part of the company very soon.

He listened to all of that silently, and after the last, said, "Are you sure he's leaving?"

"It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when," I told him.

He took a minute to swallow the information I'd dumped on him.

I closed by telling him that next time something is bothering him, he let me know right away and not let it stew for several months. "We've worked together for 7 years," I said. "We know each other far too well to let a little thing like a misunderstanding come between us." (I assume he both understood what I meant by "misunderstanding" and appreciated that I didn't call it "betrayal" outright.)

He agreed.

After that, things have been much better between us. He is agreeable to anything I tell him to do. He offers his own opinions and if they are good ones, I let him take the lead. I can tell he appreciates this and is happy that things are back to the way they were between us. But still he asked several time after our meeting if I was still sure that Il Duce was leaving, and each time I've told him, yes.

Act III: Bob's Your Uncle

Bob's Your Uncle is a different story altogether. I'm having all sorts of other issues with him. I hired him 8 years ago. He was my first new hire after I became a manager. He was completely loyal to me for the first 7 of those years, but since I promoted him to a manager (about a year ago), we've had issues. He came into his new position with ideas on what his responsibilities were that differed from mine and with ideas of how a team should be managed that have also differed from mine. He has lost two of this three staff members in that time and has proven to me on a number of other occasions that he is not so much helping me lead my team but rather trying to wrestle it in a different direction. The more he has fought against me, the harder I have to push back on him, and therefore the more unhappy he's become, as have I in the process.

Il Duce picked up on this discord between us and began meeting with Bob's Your Uncle on the sly, encouraging him, boosting him up. Bob's Your Uncle has told me this and told me how much he's appreciated the support, how comforting that was to him. He's gone on to tell me that he feels that all of the team's problems, the discord that we've felt, is all my fault for not blindly and completely supporting Il Duce at all times.

I could go into more detail, but I won't. Bob's Your Uncle had been a friend and a trusted colleague. I have my theories as to why we're in the position we're in now, but I won't go into them. It's a painful subject. The fact is, he's lost my trust and my confidence and, sadly, I am not sure how he will be able to get those back, if he would ever want them again.

I have recently removed Bob's Your Uncle from his management position. He took the news rather poorly for someone who, I would have thought, was smart enough to see it coming. I feel I did the best I could for him. I offered him his choice of two positions, both at the same grade and salary, one in my team and one in another, and he chose the other (obviously).

In the end, I feel like I've lost an appendage, perhaps one that had grown cancerous in recent months and needed to be excised, but it's a loss nonetheless. It's been two weeks, and I'm still stunned. After all, it's not often you're presented with the opportunity to put the final nail in the coffin over an eight year friendship.

I cannot look back now, only forward.

Il Duce's Impotent Revenge

In the end, Il Duce didn't get his way. I was neither fired nor moved to a different part of the company. I didn't hear from him after that for about a month, until it was time for my mid-year review. (Yes, we do these twice a year.) Again, I wrote volumes on all of the good work I and my team had gotten accomplished that year. When I met with Il Duce for the review, he ignored all of my salient achievements and simply talked about how terrible a manager I was.

As he talked, I wrote out a list of his key points. On the left side of the page I listed the positive things he said about me. There was only one, which was that my team was doing good work and therefore I deserved a little credit.

On the right side, I listed his negative points about me. There were fourteen. All of them revolved around my single "mutinous" meeting with my managers. His examples of my poor management were either twisted or fabricated completely.

When he was done, I told him I'd like to recap his points. I read them back to him and asked him to clarify if I had missed anything. When I was finished, I said, "So I've done one thing right this year and fourteen things wrong. Is that what you're saying."

"Yes."

"Just out of curiosity, did you read my comments at all?"

"Yes."

"And of all the accomplishments I detailed, you don't consider any of them noteworthy?"

And this is what he told me: "Because of the problems we're having, I can't see any of those things at all." Ah. Déjà vu.

Then he said: "You have lost my trust, and my trust isn't something given, it's something earned. You are going to have to find a way to earn it back."

Right, I thought to myself. Let me put that at the top of my priority list.

He said he was going to set up a regular monthly meeting with me so we could get back on track and to give me a chance to voice my opinions and concerns so they didn't "bottle up again and come out in inappropriate ways." He sounded as if the idea of meeting with me regularly about this was a particularly painful one and not his idea at all. (I suspected Tiberius' insistence, here.) He asked me if I thought that was a good idea. Sensing his uneasiness at the notion, I said I thought it was a fantastic idea.*

[* For the record, we only had one of those meetings, at which he asked me if there was anything I wanted to talk about, anything that he was doing that was bothering me. I asked him if there was anything he was doing that I should know about. He said that no, but he said that in the past I was worried that he was going to my employees behind my back and giving them instructions that were counter to my own. Being well aware that he was, in fact, doing this all the time even still, I asked him outright if he was doing this, to which he lied and said, "No, of course not." I replied: "In that case, if you're not, then I don't have anything to talk about," ending our one and only meeting on how we could get "back on track."]

We ended the conversation on that not too terribly surprising note. This was in September of 2007. We've spoken perhaps a half-dozen times since then.

The fallout from Il Duce, sure, I was prepared for that. It was the fallout from my own team that caught me off-guard.

Il Duce Tries To Excise His Mutineer, Fails

The next morning, I stopped in his boss' office first thing (we'll call him Tiberius) and had a chat with him. I told him I was pretty sure Il Duce was trying to fire me, told him why, and told him I'd appreciate a little notice, if that was the case, so I could get my resume out on the internet and find a job elsewhere.

He laughed and said, "Is that why [Il Duce] asked me to meet to talk about moving someone from his team to another part of the company?" (As it turned out, that meeting was an hour later. My timing was good.)

I said that, probably yes, that was me he was talking about.

Tiberius told me not to worry, that nobody was getting fired. He said, "It's not like you're chasing some cute young female analyst around the office." He laughed, not knowing how completely and utterly ironic that was.

I laughed with him. "Well, that's certainly true."

Fallout From My Coup D'état

I have a habit of doing this sort of thing. When I'm really frustrated over a situation, really unhappy, or just, in general, boxed into a corner, the only thing I can think of to do is to throw all my cards up in the air and see how they land. Like shaking up a snow globe, the air gets cloudy for a while, but eventually the dust settles and you can see clearly again.

Was I prepared for the fallout? Oh, I was pretty certain that Il Duce would hear of this eventually, somehow, but I wasn't too worried about a lame duck. Il Duce knew, at this point, that his tenure as Director of my team was about to end. I figured he'd react in a passive-aggressive manner, grumbling behind the scenes, but leave me alone for the most part.

I was wrong.

Sure enough, Il Duce found out about our meeting, indirectly, through one of my three managers (we'll call him Judas) who mostly likely told Jezebel, with whom he's worked closely for the past several years. (Ironically, Judas is the person Il Duce was at one point trying to promote Jezebel above, thus screwing him out of a deserved promotion; just a little tidbit for you.) Il Duce then called my manager in London, who we'll call Judy, into an office and made her tell him, word for word, what it was that we talked about during that 30-minute meeting on the Monday late in July of 2007. When the third manager out here (we'll call him Bob's Your Uncle), found out about this, he informed me. I thanked him and told him not to worry about it.

I called Judy and asked her if she was okay. She was horribly upset and told me all about it. She blamed Judas for putting her in the position of having to either lie to Il Duce or betray me. I told her to relax, that I didn't feel betrayed. (For truly, I didn't care, but I couldn't tell her why.) She said this was going to complicate my working relationship with Il Duce. "True," I said, adding silently not for long, "But I'd never ask you to lie for me. You did the right thing. Don't worry about it."

I called Judas and asked him if he had any idea how Il Duce found out about our meeting. He said, "No." I told him that it was okay if he mentioned it to anybody (not naming names, not calling out Jezebel at this point), that I was just curious. He denied it emphatically. I tried once more and explained that if he had something on his mind that was bothering him that he could always come to me to talk about. For the third time, he said no. (We'll end the metaphor there, for those of you following along.)

The actual fallout came a few weeks later. Il Duce had set up a teleconference with me for a supposedly benign purpose and at the start of the meeting told me he wanted to talk about something different entirely. He said he knew what I had proposed to my managers and that I needn't bother lying about it.

"Who's lying?" I said. "I'm happy to talk about anything you want."

"And I know you're calling people to ask how I found out, and this witch hunt is going to stop now." Strong emphasis on the "now" in that sentence. He had practiced this part of his conversation. I imagined him reciting this speech in the mirror as he got ready for work in the morning, and again in his car on the way in. Motorists passing him would have noticed his lips moving and wondered who he was talking to.

"I've got no witches left to hunt," I said.

He went on to rant a bit, and for a while I was fine with that. He was clearly upset, and I didn't care. I had been doing nine other things prior to his call, and while he spewed forth, I let my mind wander back to those nine other things. But at some point I think he finally got on my nerves. I think it was when he asked me, demanding really, "What would you do if you were me, in my situation?" that I finally got angry back.

"And what situation is that, exactly?" I asked.

"You know what situation I'm talking about."

"You mean being left with a mutinous employee who doesn't care for your self serving leadership style, or your decisions, and prefers to do things his own way?"

I don't think he was ready for me to spell it out so clearly. "Well, yes."

"I don't have any idea what I'd do if I were you. I don't have any idea what I'd do if I were the kind of person who'd sacrifice one team to build another just because it made my resume look better. Or who'd throw his own employees under the bus if it served his own interests. I'm happy to say I don't have a clue."

He sputtered for a while, claiming none of that was true, and tried to offer that his support of the Indian contractor initiative as evidence that he is doing everything he can for my team. I believe my response to that was: "Sure, whatever makes you feel better about yourself."

He prattled on for a while longer and finally closed by saying that he was going to have to decide what to do. I told him to let me know when he decides and hung up.

I Suggest Mutiny

Fueled with the knowledge that Il Duce was soon departing, and feeling better about my job and this company than I had in two years, I met with the three managers who work for me and help me run the team. Each one of them has complained to me in the past about things Il Duce has done to make their lives difficult. Granted these were minor complaints (he is causing us too much extra work, he is not sensitive to the needs of the day-to-day staff) but enough to get me thinking that while probably don't feel exactly the same way I did, they might at least lean in that direction. If not individually, maybe in collectively as a group.

I explained to them how I felt and what I'd been seeing from Il Duce: the inequity in his decisions, the unethical behavior, the inefficient management in general. I told them how I was frustrated, and I put the question to them, without telling them of the plans afoot to move him away from us (which I had been asked not to reveal): "Why don't we just do things our own way? We know what's best for this team, much better than [Il Duce] does. Let's decide for ourselves how things should be run and do that instead. Let's put this team back on the right track." Then I told them: "All we have to do is tell Il Duce's own bosses that we have better ways of maximizing the efficiencies of this team and they'll support us on our ideas." And I knew they would.

They blanched, visibly, at the idea. "You're putting us in an impossible position," they said, almost in unison, an a capella of hasty retreat. "We can't do that. We need to do what Il Duce says. Period."

I was disheartened, but only a little. Did I really expect them to capitulate? Maybe. Was I a little early out of that gate? Possibly. But at the same time, I thought I'd get more support, especially from the two managers I have out here in North America. (The one I have in London, hired by Il Duce two years ago, I assumed would support him.)

So I backed down. I said, "No problem, don't worry about it." I told them in no uncertain terms that I would never put them in a position where Il Duce and I were playing tug-of-war with them as the rope. I said we'd just continue doing things as we always had. (For the next few months, anyway, as I was led to believe this change would happen before the end of the year.)

But things changed there, after that meeting, which was all of about 30 minutes on a Monday at the end of July in 2007. For me, I felt better. It was out in the open, my feelings about Il Duce, my frustrations. It was a weight off of me. Slight disappointment notwithstanding, the sell-out feeling was gone. I would not ask my managers to defy Il Duce, but I was going to, henceforth and with both feet planted in the ground.

For them, however, things also changed. Inextricably. Il Duce, it seems, does not treat mutineers lightly.

My Winter of Discontent

My post-relocation contract was up in April 2007. I planned on approaching Augustus and letting him know I wasn't happy, but he announced his resignation at about the same time. Lovely. I felt trapped and increasingly discontent with my job and myself.

Il Duce gave me a substandard review for the 2005 year for pitiful reasons, but the next year I tried really hard to get along with him and do what he asked. True, I was back to my usual above average review for 2006 (and therefore back up to my usual raise and bonus), but I felt unclean about it. This is not a game I wanted to play. There is a fine line between trying to play ball with a new boss and selling out. I was unclear as to which side of the line I was on.

Fact: He raped my team to build a new one. Inflammatory rhetoric aside, that's exactly what he did. My team suffered, while his new team was growing. He didn't care about us because we did not represent his path to career advancement.

Posit: Since he did this for no other reason than to bolster his own career, this shows me that he cares little or nothing for the people around him (those not sleeping with him, anyway), and that he's willing to sacrifice any of us to serve his own purposes.

Fact: He carried on an unethical affair with one of my own employees, and passed up several good people for promotions in the process.

Fact: He micromanaged me into a corner. My team was hemorrhaging staff at about the same rate his was back in the day when he ran the U.K. division by himself, and there's little I could do about it. If I challenge him, he punishes me. If I don't challenge him, my team gets inadvertently punished by his poor management style. Thus the corner.

I talked to a friend of mine back in May about this, after I found out that Augustus was leaving. He works for my company, too, this friend of mine, but not in my department. I told him that I was thinking of leaving. This guy, who is higher up in management than I am, said he'd heard things were afoot that might change my mind and suggested I stick it out.

So I arranged a meeting with Il Duce's new boss (Augustus' replacement) and the guy above him (Il Duce's boss' boss) and told them both the same thing, that I was having a very difficult time working with Il Duce and that I wasn't very happy. Much to my surprise they both sympathized with me and seemed to agree with my opinion of him. (Apparently he hasn't made a lot of friends with this empire building of his.) They both told me that plans were underway to move him and the Business Intelligence Team to another part of the company, which would leave me to run the team my way, again, finally.

Just hold out a little longer, they said.

She's Not A Whore

The affair between Jezebel and Il Duce... I can't tell you how long it had been going on. Well over a year, but probably less than two.

About a year ago, he brought a large contingent of the European team to our head office out here on the east coast, ostensibly for team meetings with some of us North American staff, but really it was because one of their Brit friends was getting married to a Yank out here and they wanted to attend the wedding. About five of them. (Great use of company funds, don't you think?) We held our meetings as a matter of course anyway to keep up appearances.

Il Duce and Jezebel were often found walking together off on their own, sharing a quiet conversation. They were frequently the last to arrive from the hotel in the morning or the first to leave in the evening. They aroused a certain amount of suspicion. I also noticed Il Duce touching her in ways that just felt inappropriate: little pats on the small of her back or a caress on her shoulder. That was when I began to suspect.

Some months later, they took a trip to Madrid together to recruit a new employee. They took along one of my own managers (who was completely unneeded for the purposes of that visit) just so it wouldn't appear too conspicuous: the two of them jetting off to Spain, unchaperoned as it were.

When I did Jezebel's review last year (she had only been working for me for a few months, so I didn't have much to say) Il Duce told me to give her an above average score. At the time, I didn't think much of it. She is a hard worker and is well liked. Her previous manager (Renfield) said she deserved it, too, so I went ahead. In retrospect, though, I can see how incredibly inappropriate it was for Il Duce to issue such a directive.

What has really gotten my goat, however, is his attempts to promote her, especially into a position that doesn't even exist.

I have held the same title for six years, and in that time my responsibilities have doubled. He has never tried to promote me and has denied me when I have asked.

I have a manager working for me (the same one whom he was trying to promote Jezebel above earlier) who has worked in his position for almost as long as I have, who has also seen his area of responsibility double since the teams merged. I would like to promote him. Il Duce has denied this, too.

Prodigal, who should have gotten full credit for all of the good work the new team has done, wasn't even considered for that new management position. I suspect this is one of the reasons he wanted to come back to my team.

"What do you have to do to get a promotion out of [Il Duce]," Prodigal asked me. I thought of Jezebel and wondered.

When Il Duce told me to give Jezebel an above average rating on her review, he told me to give her a four (which is: "exceeds expectations") out of five ("greatly exceeds expectations"). Penelope asked me at the time: "What does she have to do to get a five? Swallow instead of spit?" (Penelope has always had a way with words.)

Another of Penelope's witticisms regarding this situation: when finding out that Jezebel was sleeping her way into a promotion that (thus far) hasn't paid off, she said, "I don't think she's a whore. Whores at least get paid." If Jezebel is in this for a promotion, she's been waiting for well over a year to get it.

Coming up next... I propose mutiny.

Sex, Lies and Defections: My Prodigal Son Returns Home

Not everybody that moved over to the new Business Intelligence Team was happy about it. One of my more valuable employees who had worked for me for years (we'll call him Prodigal) got convinced to move over to the new team because he loves trying new things and was given a bill of sale that promised a rapid rise up the career ladder, but he quickly became quite unhappy with how Il Duce was running (that is: controlling) that team, and the promotions never came. In fact, Il Duce brought people in off the street into higher positions and ignored Prodigal. This made him unhappy.

Il Duce's managing style made him unhappier.

Il Duce is big on process. Document everything. Provide detailed status reports regularly (weekly or daily, depending on how the project is doing and how he feels about you). Hold lots of meetings. Take lots of notes. Make lots of noise in the process so everyone knows how much you're doing.

By contrasts, I am big on progress. Get your work done in whatever manner suits you best. Do it well, is all I ask. Keep me informed as needed.

One of those methodologies works well for Prodigal, and it isn't Il Duce's.

Prodigal wanted to come back to my team. I said I would bring him back if I could, but I wasn't allowed to add new head-count to my staff. I was sad when he decided to leave and sadder still when he wanted to come back knowing I didn't have much of a chance to make that happen.

Or so I thought.

At the same time, another of my employees (we'll call her Jezebel) was actively being courted by Il Duce to come over to his new team. Little did I know, he and Jezebel were having an affair, illicit in every sense of the word, as it destroyed both of their marriages. (Apparently, at some point about a year ago, Il Duce wrote Jezebel a detailed and sappy love letter that her husband found and threatened to send it to all of her co-workers, me included, as I was her boss, if she didn't call off the affair. He held that over her for a while before they finally separated. Meanwhile, Il Duce left his wife and young daughter, too. All of this was going on quietly behind the scenes. Shhh. Don't tell anybody.)

Jezebel had been wanting a promotion for a while. However, the only place for her to go in my team was to a middle management level just below me. I had been wanting to create that role and fill it for some time, but another of my employees was much more qualified and suited. Il Duce tried to get me to promote her over this guy, something I successfully petitioned against (finally cashing in on the good-will I'd built up with Augustus after I moved out to the east coast), and when that failed, he decided to create a management position for her in his new team. That team only had 6 members and they already had a manager (Renfield). But Il Duce had requested to hire 30 more people (I shudder at the thought) and claimed he needed her as a second manager to facilitate.

When I found out he was going to move Jezebel over to his new team, I told him he couldn't have her unless I could have Prodigal back. I made a little noise about this which caught all of the right attention now that I was working in the corporate head office. When, Il Duce learned Augustus supported me on this, I can't imagine he was too happy with either of us. Prodigal was one of his best employees and the only one who had built anything usable for his team so far. All of the good press they'd had with upper management was because of Prodigal's work. He didn't want to lose him.

At the same time, I believe he would have done anything to get his girlfriend, Jezebel, the promotion she'd been wanting and expecting after so many nights of promises.

So Il Duce flew out to North America and met with Prodigal in person. He tried to get him to stay on his team. He told Prodigal that there were no career opportunities if he went back to my team and that the only way to advance would be to stay in new team. Prodigal said no.

More was said during that conversation, as I've been told, but I wasn't there to hear it so I won't repeat it. Il Duce doesn't like it when he doesn't get his way. He can get rather nasty about it. I've seen this first-hand. Needless to say, Prodigal left quite unhappy with him, more determined than ever to leave that team. Il Duce left quite unhappy with me. In the end I got my Prodigal son back, so I didn't care. (He's working for me again today.)

Team Unity, Or Lack Thereof

While my team struggled, Il Duce was actively championing the Business Intelligence cause with upper management, telling them how important it was, and convincing them to let him hire more people to supplement the four he had. (And, I found out later, he had designs on another of my staff - in more ways than one - but more on that later.) He began to hire more people for that team.

This past May (2007) I lost my first North American employee in 5 years. Someone quit. Our numbers dwindled to 16.

We were increasingly overworked. The management above Il Duce wanted to take my two losses and replace them with cheaper staff in India. True, they are cheaper. The salaries paid to these two would pay for six contractors in India. But it takes months to screen agencies, negotiate contracts, and start bringing employees on board. And months on top of that to train the new staff. I needed new staff then, not six to twelve months down the line.

Il Duce was content to let this happen, all the while focusing on doing whatever he could to build up his new team while my team struggled with longer hours and more work per person. The best I could do for my staff was to try to find efficiencies where I could and pare down on the extra work Il Duce expected of them (us) with the customer coddling that he found so valuable.

Luckily, he was so busy with his new team that he didn't notice much.

Empire Building

We built up empires. We stole countries. That's how you build an empire. We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Yeah, just sail around the world and stick a flag in. -Eddie Izzard, Dress To Kill (1998)

The two teams came together under Il Duce 's leadership, but they didn't really combine. He promoted one of the European managers to be my new counterpart (we'll call this guy Renfield) when Il Duce, himself, moved up. Renfield and I continued to run our own two teams under Il Duce's instructions.

Il Duce is an empire builder. He looks for ways to expand his own job to show people that he is ready for career advancement. It has worked well for him. He has advanced. For example: to get his new title as the global Director, he applied for a different position that Augustus had posted to lead a completely new team and then convinced him that this new team should fall under the same umbrella as his old team and that he could lead both. (Augustus, poor fool, should have asked for a few other opinions before agreeing to that deal.) Sadly, the new team that Il Duce and Augustus formed was quickly taken away and reassigned to a different department, and Il Duce was left only managing me and Renfield, begging the question(s) of what had he really done to deserve his promotion in the first place and why was he still a global Director?

However, being an empire builder (ironic that he's British) he quickly moved on to new ventures. A year into his reign, he was ready to spin off a whole new team under his global directorship which would focus on our company's Business Intelligence. (Often a contradiction in terms, this is fancy industry-speak for giving your company's executives all the data they need, at their fingertips, to make quick strategy decisions. It's a fine idea, if you can pull it off, which, in a company as spread out and incongruous as mine, and with as much data to sift through as we have, is very difficult.)

So he split the team, which previously did nothing but handle database administration, into two groups. He had 22 people at this point. He took 4 of them over to this Business Intelligence Team, making Renfield the head of that team, leaving me with the remaining 18 staff for database administration. I told him that if he was going to double my responsibility he needed to promote me at the same time. He replied that it was not possible to promote me to the level of Director when he, himself, was a Director (something I later found out was completely inaccurate), that maybe he would consider it if-and-when he got promoted to a Senior Director, and hinted that if I didn't take the job "as is" he would find someone else to do it.

Rock and a hard place? Yeah. I took the job with bittersweet feelings about it. On the one hand, I was excited that my responsibility doubled from just managing the North American crew to now managing a global team, but on the other hand, I was disappointed that I didn't get a promotion or a single extra penny for it.

Furthermore, when he had stripped away four people to build his new team, he was not able to replace them, so we were asked to do the same amount of work with fewer people. At about the same time, one of my new staff members on the European team quit (courtesy of Il Duce's high turn-over style of management), bringing our number down to 17 (from 22).

My team was struggling.

Self Assessment Concerns

Working with Il Duce was, if not exactly interesting, let's say educational, or at the very least eye-opening. Or rather, irritating. Here's just one example:

Every January we go through an employee appraisal process. We (the managers) have to write lengthy reviews of each employee and give them numeric scores to go with it. But before we do, the employees have a chance to write their own reviews of themselves. This is optional and is stated so in the instructions we get from HR every year. I give each employee about a month to write their own comments before they have to send them to me so I can write mine. I tell them that their comments are appreciated but not necessary. They can sway me slightly but only if they are well-written, properly thought-out, and persuasive. However, I've spent the whole year working with this team, and I don't need them to tell me what they've done well and what they haven't.

So, the first year working for Il Duce, January of 2006, I did the same as I've always done. And for my own review, I wrote comments on the few subjects I felt I wanted to highlight, same as I'd done for years, but left the others blank. It came out to about 3 paragraphs.

Il Duce sent my review back to me, demanding more. He said I'd not written enough, that my sparse comments only showed upper management that I was apathetic about my job.

I explained that this is how we'd done things for years, that HR themselves said these were optional comments, and that I'd never written anything lengthy before. Furthermore, I explained, I didn't require them of my team and I'd already gotten their ("sparse") comments from them and was done, myself, with writing my own reviews (which are typically quite verbose, since as you can see I'm not one to shy away from an open forum). On top of that, I argued that upper management should look at the reviews that we write (as managers), that the only people the employee's comments are meant for are their direct manager.

What he took from that discussion was that the apathy that I was showing myself was something that I encouraged in my entire staff; therefore I was failing them as a manager.

The end result was that I got a below-average rating on my annual review, the first in 8 years at the company. He wrote at length about how I failed my team during the review process. How I let them look bad to upper management. How I put a bad face on the group by not understanding how things really worked.

When I got my below-average rating, I asked him if there was anything else I'd done all year long to warrant this. There wasn't. I asked him if all of the good work I'd done the whole year was negated by this one difference of opinion. Yes, he said. This one thing was significant enough to impact my entire rating.

Needless to say, on subsequent appraisals, I insisted that my staff write their own self assessments (at least something in every category, I required of them now) and I myself wrote volumes. The last self-assessment I wrote for Il Duce was 9 single-spaced pages, about 5000 words. By his own admittance, he didn't even read it.

Relocation

When the two teams merged (July 2005), the first thing I considered was moving to where our headquarters is located on the east coast. In the Kansas office, I was always more than an arm's length away from upper management. I had already developed a decent rapport with Il Duce's manager (we'll call him Augustus; he was located in the east coast office, whereas Il Duce worked out of London), and I felt that perhaps, if I needed someone's ear, he would listen.

I met with Augustus shortly after finding out I was going to be working for Il Duce. I told him that I didn't know if I could make it work, that our managing styles might be too different, but that I was committed to my team and to the company and wanted to see it through. I told him that I'd give it a year. He thanked me, told me he understood, and asked that if I felt I couldn't make it work to let him know. He wasn't promising anything, but he said he'd like to at least have the chance to find me another position in the company because he didn't want to lose me or the experience and skills I had to offer. I knew he was just being polite, that the chances he could find me another position were probably slim, but I was happy he at least expressed the sentiment. We left it at that.

I accepted their relocation package, and in fall of 2005 Penelope and I put our house up on the market. We ended up moving the following April, much faster than we expected (the housing market already sliding down the slippery slopes of what it was about to become, we thought it would take much longer). At that time I had to sign a contract saying that I wouldn't leave the company for one year or I would have to pay back the relocation expenses, which I couldn't afford to do. My trial year working for Il Duce, per my agreement with Augustus, which should have ended in July 2006, had just been extended until April 2007.

What Happened

In the last 10 years at this company, I've held four different titles, worked for seven different managers in five different office buildings in three different states (I've moved around a lot). I started at the entry level and rather quickly moved up to management. Either somebody noticed an aptitude on my part, or they were simply desperate for managers. I got in during the early days, and therefore I have had the opportunity to hand-pick a number of the people on my team. Many of them are all still with me.

My company does... well, a number of things, really. I'll spare you the boring details. We're primarily a company that deals with data. And me and my team... what do we do? We're database administrators. That data has to go somewhere, and we have large banks of databases to hold it. We don't know much about the data, where it comes from, what it is, where it goes. We just keep it safe and secure. We have about 20 terabytes of data to watch over. (That's the equivalent of 2200 DVD's, 30,000 CD's, or about 14 billion floppy diskettes, for those of you old enough to remember what those are.)

When I started, I was one of the few database administrators in the company (our databases were much smaller then), but the company was growing and the amount of data stored was growing. As a result, my team grew as well. About two years after I started, I was promoted to the manager of a small team in Kansas. About two years after that I was prompted again to the head of the North American team. I had about ten people in my staff at that point, most of whom I hired myself.

At the same time as we were looking over the databases in the U.S., there was a similar team looking over the databases in the U.K. Together, we looked over (just about) all of the data in the company.

The European team was led by a guy we'll call Il Duce (not to be too subtle) who had the same number of people working for him, but for some reason he was less effective. His team was only able to manage about half the load as my team.

Oh, I have my theories as to why, and a lot of them have to do with my assessment that I'm just better at what I do. But if I were to really break it down, I'd have to say that the base cause is that we have two very different sets of priorities.

For my part, I focused on my team. I felt they worked very hard to serve a sometimes ungrateful company. My company does not produce anything other than data. Therefore, as the database administrators, our jobs are paramount to its success. Unfortunately, we get blamed for all manner of sins that have nothing to do with us simply because most people often don't understand what we do or how we do it (yes, database administration is something of a black art in the IT community). When things go wrong, we are expected to jump in and fix problems that we didn't cause (late at night, on weekends, over holidays, basically anytime problems can and will arise). It can be frustrating at least and demoralizing at worst. So I do whatever I can to keep my team happy. My philosophy as a team manager is this: "Take care of the team, and the team will take care of you." This philosophy has served me well over the years. Mostly.

In my tenure as the head of the North American team, I had a remarkably low turn-over: I only lost one employee in 4 years (which, in the IT industry, even in the post-2001 tech market crash, is something to be proud of). And my team supported about 2/3rds of the company's data.

By contrast, Il Duce focused on the customer. His philosophy is this: "Keep the customer happy, and they'll take care of you." Of course, our "customers" (mind you) are all internal: data managers, application developers, sales staff, technicians, etc. I'm not talking about my company's actual external customers. (We in IT aren't allowed to interact with them, wisely enough.) Although we're all on the same team, these "customers" are the very people who make our jobs difficult, who complain loudly and angrily when things go wrong, who waste time pointing fingers instead of trying to resolve issues, who scramble to cover their collective asses so when the proverbial shit hits the fan none of it lands on them. These are the people Il Duce takes care of. He does whatever he can to make sure they are happy so they won't complain about him. Which means that over the years, my team has gotten more ill-deserved complaints than his. Fair enough.

However, his team suffers for it. When push comes to shove, he'll turn on them if it means keeping the customer happy. He doesn't look out for his employee's best interests, and as a result he has had a lot of turn-over. Also, with the same number of employees, he only supported about third of the company's data, half of what we supported.

Then, in July of 2005 (two and a half years ago) I found out that the two teams were going to merge together, and that Il Duce was being promoted to the Director of the global team. Instead of being peers, I would be reporting to him.

I was concerned. We did not see eye-to-eye on how our teams should be run, I knew that already. I'd been watching him for several years. Since our two teams did the same thing, there were many occasions for us to work together and I had many chances to see his philosophy in action. Until then I happily agreed to disagree with him and do things my own way. Now that we had merged and were effectively put under his direction, I had to ask myself if this was something I could live with.

Better yet, was I ready to leave the company? I'd worked there for over seven years at that point. That's a good long time. Nothing wrong with venturing out and finding a new job. But at the same time, I'd developed a lot of good relationships, too. I'd hired a lot of good people that I didn't want to leave behind, especially not under a new boss who would not value them the way I did.

Ultimately, I decided to stay. Common sense won over and told me to stick it out and see how things went. I could always decide to leave later, but I could not decide later on to come back if I left now. I hoped that Il Duce and I could compromise and find some middle ground between our two management styles. I was willing to try to meet him half way as long as it didn't ever mean betraying my own team.

The question was: would he meet me?

Happy Beginnings

Ten years ago, I was more or less jobless. I'd been out of school for a couple years (with a career-inspiring English Lit. degree) and hadn't held down any real job for long. I'd moved around quite a bit, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

My previous gig was working for a telecommunications company in Chicago in their billing department. The company had decided to close that location, oddly announcing it about two years in advance (probably per some union stipulation), and the rats were fleeing the sinking ship. They hired a bunch of us as "term" employees to fill in until they finally shut the lights off. I stayed about a year.

My job was doing something with databases, little tiny databases, that held billing information, but I won't bore you with the details. I didn't know anything about them when I started, but I was slightly better at computers that the rest of the staff there so they handed me that job. I suppose I'm a fast learner, because it didn't take long for me to master the skills involved and do the job fairly easily.

It wasn't a bad place to work. There was sort of an "us vs. them" mentality between the term employees and the perms who stayed around, but it was tolerable. I met some nice people there, some that I've stayed in contact with over the years.

That's also where I met my future wife, who we'll call Penelope.

I left that job in September 1997 and moved to Missouri (where my parents had relocated while I was in college, several years back). Penelope stayed on. We didn't really have a plan. We were in love, that much was for sure, and neither one of us wanted to stay in the Chicago area, but with only one job between us (and temporary at best), our prospects were slim.

In Missouri, I worked part time for my Dad (retired from his chosen profession and enjoying a second career as a freelance handyman) doing odd jobs: painting houses, finishing basements, etc. He couldn't pay me much, but it was enough to make the car payment and a few other bills. I stayed in their basement while I looked for something else.

Meanwhile, Penelope was back in Chicago. I visited her a couple times in the fall. She drove out for Thanksgiving. I went back for Christmas. She came out for New Year's. By then, I knew we had to get our act together. I asked her to quit her job and move out, just throw chance and fate to the wind. It was crazy, we both knew, but we found her a little apartment close to my parent's house and she drove back to Chicago to give notice.

A week later I got a call from a contract agency who'd seen my resume online. They knew of a company who was looking for someone with database skills. I said, sure, I'd come in for an interview, leaving out the part that my database skills were negligible. I knew some key words and phrases that made me sound like I knew what I was doing.

Two interviews later, I was hired.* They were desperate. Qualifications included having a pulse and standing relatively upright. Still, though, I spent the first several weeks (which became the first several months) learning as much as I could to do the job I was now being paid to do. Like I said: I learn fast. Lucky thing, too.

Penelope moved out two weeks later. We now had one good job between us, and I was making enough money to pay both of our bills combined. They converted me from a contractor to full time in March and gave me a nice raise. Penelope and I got married in June. It seemed like a perfect beginning to our lives and certainly to my career prospects which had been bleak just months before.

Life was good, my job was good, and I was happy, until something happened.


* 10 years ago today.

Work Shit

What a mess it's become, my job. Several years ago, it was neat, orderly, running smoothly. I was happy and content. In the past 3 years, it's all gone downhill. There is light at the end of the tunnel now, but I have a ways to go before I get back to where I was. Happy again. Excited to go in every day. I miss that feeling.

In order to make some sense of what's going on, I decided to take some time and write it all down. Feel free to skim it or skip it entirely. I often find writing to be therapeutic, so I'm going in headfirst for some therapy.

I'll start with a little background.